Suppose I have an ELF-only system but for some reason want to compile
an a.out libc from scratch. I'd need an ELF-compiled dlltools in that
situation. (Maybe I'm paranoid about retrieving binaries off the net
and want to eyeball the source first. Of course I have to trust
dlltools for this.)
David Engel writes:
>I'm copying this to debian-devel because I think it's a good question.
>I'm surprised nobody else asked it.
>
>>>Please note that I am not the normal maintainer of this package. All
>>>I have done is rebuild it to help speed up the conversion to ELF.
>>>[...]
>>>Source: dlltools
>>>Binary: dlltools
>>>Version: 2.17-11
>>>Description:
>>> dlltools: Tools used to create DLL jumptable libraries.
>>
>>Uhm, David, why does this need to be compiled for ELF? Isn't this used
>>exclusively for creating a.out shared libraries?
>
>Yes, it is only for *creating* a.out libraries, but that doesn't mean
>it can't be ELF. A better question is if virtually everything else is
>ELF, why shouldn't this be as well? The same goes for the aout-gcc
>and aout-binutils packages.